Thank you for the kind introduction. And thank you to our host nation, the United Arab Emirates, and congratulations on celebrating your golden jubilee—50 years as a nation.

I am honored to be with you today on behalf of President Biden and to be joined by Chargé d’Affaires Sean Murphy, Commissioner General Clark, Senator Roy Blunt from the state of Missouri, and all the members of our delegation.

Expo 2020 Dubai is an extraordinary accomplishment, and a first for the Middle East. The United States greatly appreciates the UAE’s commitment to a successful, inclusive, safe, and healthy Expo for everyone. The US and UAE have an enduring partnership built on trade, mutual understanding, and a commitment to regional security and stability.

Expo 2020 Dubai exemplifies our work to build a better world and a better future together. I witnessed that firsthand today while touring the Expo, including the inspiring UAE and leadership pavilions.

I was also proud to visit Ukraine’s Pavilion. As President Biden said during his State of the Union address, "The United States of America stands with the Ukrainian people.”

The Expo has welcomed over 16 million visitors. We’re proud to have hosted many of them at our USA Pavilion, where we showcase how our history and values continue to power innovation in the 21st Century.

From Alexander’s Graham Bell’s telephone, first introduced at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, to Steve Job’s iPhone, featured in our exhibit, visitors from all backgrounds are inspired to dream, invent, and build.

And we feature modern American inventors, explorers, and visionaries, like NASA astronaut Dr. Yvonne Cagle and young inventor Gitanjali Rao– both of whom traveled here to meet and speak with Expo’s visitors.

We’ve brought some of our diverse culture, including music, food, and dance, with the support of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

The USA Pavilion also proudly hosted Thomas Jefferson’s Q’uran, on loan from the Library of Congress. This was the first time the Library allowed this valuable piece of American history to leave the US.

Our Pavilion features a full-size model of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which will carry the UAE’s lunar rover Rashid to the lunar surface this year – an example of how our nations are collaborating in pursuit of the future.

NASA has been working with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center to train the UAE’s astronauts, including the first Arab female astronaut Nora al-Matrooshi. Collaboration on space exploration by America’s research institutions, entrepreneurs, and investors is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the fight against climate change.

Working with the private sector to strengthen innovation and investment, we are launching a series of “earth shots” to accelerate clean energy breakthroughs within a decade, creating new clean energy jobs, and scaling up U.S. production and export of clean goods and services.

But we cannot do this alone.

We strongly support the UAE’s ambitious net-zero initiative and hope to bring a Clean Tech Trade Mission to the UAE and the region.

We also look forward to continuing our collaboration with the UAE across commercial sectors. The U.S. Department of Commerce brought over 100 companies to Dubai this week for our flagship trade mission, Trade Winds.

As part of this event, we also are hosting the Women Empowered Leave Legacies Through Trade and Investment Summit.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, few things are more important for global security and well-being than health and wellness.

That’s why “Healthy People, Healthy Planet – Wellness and Wellbeing for All” would be the right theme for the World Expo in 2027 and why the United States – and especially Minnesota – would be the right place to host it.

The University of Minnesota is at the forefront of global fights against HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika. And the world-renowned Mayo Clinic’s specialty care draws over a million patients from 140 countries every year.

We look forward to the decision on Expo 2027, and hope the 2027 Expo will be just as exciting and inspiring as Expo 2020 Dubai.

Thank you again to the UAE for hosting us, and thanks to all of you for joining us to celebrate U.S. National Day, as we strive to live up to the promise of “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of the Future.”